When Lukas Haffer was 12 years old, sitting at the kitchen table in his small German hometown, his parents told him and his siblings they'd all have to make sacrifices to keep their home.
The 2008 global financial crisis had arrived, and it didn't stop at Wall Street. It rippled across the Atlantic to a quiet town full of engineers and scientists — people who made machines for automotive factories. His father's employer was struggling. The family almost lost everything.
His dad tried to explain it simply: irresponsible business leaders on Wall Street had made bad decisions, and now families like theirs were paying the price.
That 12-year-old thought to himself — if a few bad businessmen gambling with the world economy could cause that much destruction, enough that a family on the other side of the planet was having that kitchen table conversation, then maybe a good businessman could make an equally big impact in the other direction.
Now he's the CEO and founder of Casca, which just won a BIG Innovation Award for building AI-powered small business lending technology that helps banks originate loans 10 times faster than traditional manual processes.
"For us, this journey started with a simple belief: small business owners deserve better," Haffer explains. "They deserve access to capital that isn't predatory and doesn't take 90 days."
The problem is massive, and the stakes are personal. Nearly 33 million small businesses operate in America, employing roughly half of all private sector workers. These aren't the Googles and Amazons you hear about on the news. These are bakeries with broken ovens, laundromats needing new equipment, corner shops expanding into a second location. They are the actual economic engine that puts food on tables and builds communities.
And they're getting crushed by a lending system that offers two terrible choices.
The Two Bad Options Destroying Small Business
If you need capital for your small business right now, you face a brutal choice between slow and affordable or fast and predatory. The banks offer the lowest interest rates and most reasonable terms, but applying for a small business loan through traditional channels typically takes 60 to 90 days of constant back-and-forth emails requesting documents. You wait for weeks, then get asked for five more documents. You provide those, wait some more, then the bank says no. Most small business owners give up after trying with the first bank because they're too exhausted to start the process again.
That's when they fall prey to the online lenders with beautiful marketing promising funding in 24 hours or less. The websites look professional, the application is easy, the money shows up fast. Then the rude awakening hits when you realize you're paying 25%, 35%, sometimes over 100% APR on a short-term high-interest loan that's crushing your cash flow.
According to research on merchant cash advances, these predatory products can carry APRs exceeding 350% with daily repayment schedules that destroy business cash flow. Because merchant cash advances aren't technically classified as loans, they're not subject to state usury laws that cap interest rates, creating a legal gray area that allows providers to charge fees that would be illegal for traditional lenders.
Haffer sees this constantly. Small businesses walking around with short-term online loans on their balance sheets clocking in at APRs above 100%. It's brutal, it's unethical, it's predatory on people trying to do something good for their communities.
"I can't fix predatory lending. But I can build the technology that helps community banks — who already have affordable capital — get money to small businesses in days, not months."
That's what his team at Casca does.
33 Million Small Businesses Employing 60% Of America
The scale of the problem matches the scale of the opportunity. According to the Small Business Administration Office of Advocacy, there are 33.3 million small businesses in America accounting for 46% of all private sector employment. That represents 62.3 million American workers whose jobs depend on small business health.
Small businesses created nearly two-thirds of net new jobs over the last 30 years and represent 97% of exporting firms. They contribute roughly 44% of U.S. GDP. This isn't some niche market, this is the foundation of the American economy and the American dream for individual entrepreneurs.
The Federal Reserve's 2024 Small Business Credit Survey found that 37% of firms applied for a loan, line of credit, or merchant cash advance in the prior 12 months. Among those applicants, small banks had the highest approval rates at 54%, but satisfaction with lenders fell overall between 2023 and 2024, particularly among applicants to online lenders where net satisfaction dropped from 15% to just 2%.
The data tells a clear story. Small businesses need capital. Banks want to lend to them. But the process is broken, pushing desperate business owners toward predatory alternatives that can destroy the very businesses they're trying to save.
Think about the baker whose oven breaks. That's a $25,000 to $30,000 emergency replacement. If the baker can't get funding fast enough to replace the oven, the shop doesn't open Monday. If it doesn't open Monday and it takes 90 days to get bank approval for the repair loan, that business might never open again. That's an American dream crushed, employees without paychecks, families having difficult kitchen table conversations.
The baker who can't wait 90 days ends up at a merchant cash advance provider paying $20,000 a month on a loan that a bank would have charged $2,000 a month over 10 years at 9% APR instead of 25% to 35% or higher. An order of magnitude difference in monthly payments that determines whether businesses survive or fail.
Hiring Outside The Industry To Break The Pattern
For Haffer, the path to Casca started despite his parents' expectations. Both hold PhDs in chemistry. Science was their noble cause, their way of contributing to the world. His mom wanted him to study physics, but he went to university to study business instead. .
While getting his MBA at Stanford, he learned about the ethos of the entrepreneur. Today that drives everything at Casca.
Casca's origin story starts a little over two years ago with a small community bank in Connecticut — roughly 100 to 150 employees — that wanted to launch a nationwide small business lending program. With a limited staff, they knew they couldn't run everything on paper and manual email exchanges. They needed to automate.
The first problem Casca solved was the front door: creating a clean, intuitive online application. Most banks still don't have a simple digital form where small businesses can apply for loans. In 2026, that sounds implausible — but it's the reality at thousands of community and regional banks across the country.
The second problem was what happens after someone starts an application but doesn't finish. When a business owner begins filling out a loan application on their phone during a commute and hits a field asking for their EIN — their employer identification number — most don't know it offhand. They think, "I'll come back to this later," and almost never do. Unless you stay top of inbox, top of mind.
Casca built AI-powered follow-up messages that guide applicants through the process with personalized, conversational outreach: "Hi Russ, I saw that you started an application for a $150,000 working capital loan. I'd love to learn more about your business. I also noticed you paused on the EIN section — you can usually find your EIN on the letter the IRS sent when you incorporated, or on your most recent business tax return. Here's a link to jump back in and pick up right where you left off."
People respond. Conversion rates went from less than 10% to over 80% of applicants submitting complete loan applications within weeks. It turns out that if you make it easy for people to apply for a loan they already want, they will. That shouldn't be revolutionary in 2026 — but it is.
The Bottleneck On The Other Side
Those first couple months focused on customer experience to make it easy for small business owners to submit everything they have. Then Casca realized they were creating a bottleneck on the banker side. Loan officers who used to look at four deals a week suddenly had more than 80 applications in their backlog waiting for review.
So the focus swapped to automating all the tedious manual steps that bankers take. Every document uploaded gets read, classified, and analyzed. Tax returns get extracted for revenue, net income, addbacks like owner compensation and dividends that show the business's ability to pay back debt. The system needs to understand whether it's looking at a 2022 business tax return for an LLC or a C-Corp, whether it's management-prepared profit and loss statements from QuickBooks or handwritten in Excel.
Tax returns are relatively structured and look similar year to year across most businesses. Management-prepared financials are completely unstructured and look different for every business. A bakery might list out costs for every ingredient or sum everything under cost of goods sold. Casca has a team of machine learning engineers specializing in sorting through these documents correctly to automate preparing materials for the underwriter.
The underwriter still makes the final decision. A human still reviews everything. Casca cares deeply about this being a process where technology accelerates the human but does not replace the human. Using AI responsibly in financial services means it's fully human-in-the-loop, explainable, and auditable so there's no risk of injustice by the system.
There are many other automated steps that seem small but matter enormously. Automatically pulling a report from the Secretary of State to verify a business is in good standing. Checking whether the business filed annual filings and paid annual fees. If a business isn't in good standing and the bank doesn't use Casca's software, the application might get rejected with no explanation. With Casca, the system notifies the business owner and gives them a chance to quickly pay the $65 fee and get back to good standing.
These seem like trivial details until you're the business owner who got rejected for a loan and never found out it was because you forgot to pay a $65 annual state fee.
From 90 Days To 3 Weeks To 3 Days
The traditional timeline for small business loans runs 60 to 90 days from application to funding. Casca's customers are now seeing some loans fund in less than three weeks depending on size. That's a transformation from three months to three weeks.
But the goal is three days. At three days, Casca becomes just as fast as the predatory online loans, except the interest rates are a fraction of the cost and monthly payments are often an order of magnitude lower.
Think about that baker with the broken oven again. Three-day approval at 9% APR instead of 90-day approval means the shop opens Monday instead of closing permanently. Three-day approval instead of 24-hour predatory funding means paying $2,000 a month instead of $20,000 a month. That's the difference between surviving and thriving versus drowning in debt.
The loans Casca helps banks originate are often government-guaranteed SBA loans, Small Business Administration loans that carry interest rates as low as 9% over 10-year terms. Compare that to merchant cash advances with effective APRs of 25%, 35%, sometimes exceeding 100% or even reaching 350% on the highest-predatory products.
Casca currently partners with both of the top two largest SBA lenders in the country. Live Oak Bank is the largest SBA lender by dollar amount funded. Huntington Bank is the largest lender by number of loans funded and also one of the 10 largest banks in America. Both are investors in Casca, showing the incredible belief that the banks themselves have in the technology.
Why Community Banks Can't Keep Up With Technology
For the really large banks like JP Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo with IT budgets exceeding $10 billion and tens of thousands of engineers, they theoretically have the ability to build these systems themselves. But even for them, it might not be worth building something that's fundamentally the same for everyone when they should focus engineering resources on things that actually differentiate their business.
For community and regional banks, they absolutely need to look for a team of experts that do this and nothing else, that focus their entire mind space and heart and passion on building better small business lending software. The outcome is a great experience for bank employees and a great experience for bank customers.
The structure of American banking creates an interesting dynamic. Focusing on large companies and lending to large corporations takes just as much effort as originating a small business loan, but it's a much larger amount of capital going out the door producing interest income. To make small business lending attractive to banks, you need to make it automated so that instead of taking 90 days with 15 different people involved in originating one loan, it takes just a couple of minutes for a couple of people to validate everything is going the right way.
That makes it attractive for banks to do way more small business lending because the demand is absolutely there. Thirty-three million small businesses employ more than 60% of the American workforce and produce a large proportion of U.S. GDP. They could do so much more with access to affordable capital.
The Deep Mission Focus
For Haffer, business is about making an impact on the world. Casca regularly invites small business owners to speak in team meetings and tell the engineers what impact their work has. It moves him to tears hearing stories of folks who've been working on their companies for a decade, employing hundreds of people, standing in front of financial and personal ruin because of high-interest-rate online loans.
Watching those business owners transform when they refinance predatory loans with bank loans or take out bank loans in the first place, seeing them get back on their feet and return to growth and cash flow positivity, that's what drives the mission.
The ethos of the honorable businessman that Haffer learned studying business, combined with thinking about the small businesses that employed everyone in his hometown including his dad, that creates the foundation for how Casca operates. The decisions made in financial services have enormous impact on the composition of the economy and the lives of working families.
Haffer can't change the fact that online lenders charge high rates because they have high cost of capital. But he can change the fact that community banks with low cost of capital and affordable rates are sitting on old technology that makes lending to small businesses too slow and too manual to compete.
The Baker, The Laundromat, The Corner Shop
The Connecticut community bank that was Casca's first customer wanted to lend to businesses in their community. The laundromats, the bakeries, the corner shops. Real businesses employing real people in real communities.
They didn't have enough employees to process applications manually, so they needed automation from the start. The beautiful online application let people complete forms easily. The AI-powered follow-up messages kept applicants engaged and answered questions. The automated document processing and underwriting preparation let a small team handle far more loan volume than traditional manual processes.
The conversion rate jump from under 10% to over 80% meant the bank could actually serve its community instead of losing applicants to frustration or predatory alternatives. The three-week approval timeline instead of three-month timeline meant businesses could get capital when they actually needed it.
This is the model that makes sense for America's small business economy. Community banks know their communities. They understand local real estate, local businesses, where money is well invested. They live in the places they serve. They want to help, they just need better technology.
Casca doesn't try to become the loan agent or lending source. There's no lack of banks in America with plenty of capital deployed locally. The opportunity is empowering the good people working at community banks who want to help their communities by giving them technology that makes it possible to compete with the speed of online lenders while maintaining the affordability of traditional bank lending.
What Convinced Casca To Target SBA Lenders
For Haffer, business is about impact — and that deep mission focus is what drove the decision to partner with banks on SBA lending. He's heard the stories firsthand: small business owners who've been working for a decade, employing hundreds of people, standing in front of ruin because of predatory loan terms. Then they get access to affordable capital, and everything transforms. That's the whole point.
The SBA-guaranteed loans offer some of the best terms available to small businesses. Interest rates as low as 9%, terms up to 10 years, monthly payments a fraction of what merchant cash advances charge. These are the products that actually help small businesses instead of extracting value from them.
Partnering with the top SBA lenders means maximum impact. Live Oak Bank and Huntington Bank being both partners and investors shows how aligned everyone is on the mission. The banks see the value, they're betting on the technology, and together they're serving small businesses.
Speed Of Adoption And Bank Implementation
For some banks, getting online with Casca's software happens in weeks. For larger banks with tens of thousands of employees, it's a massive project requiring training and process adaptation. The good news is Casca's software is modern and intuitive, so it shouldn't require extensive explanation.
But in large organizations in highly regulated sectors, processes need to be adapted and signed off by compliance and auditors. Casca's team isn't new to the industry and understands that larger implementations take longer. Right now multiple projects are underway getting the software stood up with some of the largest small business lenders in the country.
The banking industry is conservative by necessity. Moving fast is important but moving correctly matters more. The regulatory environment demands careful implementation, thorough testing, and complete documentation. Casca works within that reality while still pushing to make adoption as smooth and fast as possible.
AI-First Development And Task Automation
Casca built its software AI-native from the beginning. That means two things. First, the company uses AI to build software faster and with higher quality, internally leveraging AI to solve problems for customers. Second, the software itself is designed to be used by AI to perform tasks, with capabilities expanding as AI gets more capable over time.
In the early days analyzing tax returns, there was still an error rate. Now the error rate is plummeting rapidly and the system has become extremely competent at analyzing business financials. There are still situations where AI might make mistakes drafting follow-up emails responding to nuanced customer questions, but over time those errors disappear.
You can imagine a future where businesses have an AI assistant coaching them through the entire loan application process, with customers fully aware they're interacting with AI. That's not what Casca does today because when you're asking a question to your bank, you expect a banker to be involved in answering. But in other industries, people are already interacting purely with AI agents for customer support.
The evolution is clear. As AI gets better, the number of tasks that can be automated or significantly accelerated keeps expanding. Tax return analysis that used to require human review now happens automatically with extremely high accuracy. Follow-up email drafting that might have had errors is getting better constantly. The trend line points toward faster, better, more capable systems.
The Customer Experience Problem That Modern Banks Miss
Haffer's advice for community bank executives who want to modernize lending operations without buying Casca's service is simple: fix the customer experience. Small business lending specifically is lacking customer experience focus at almost all banks.
When banks start investing in customer experience, they focus on personal consumer banking. They made auto lending easier, improve mortgage applications, and streamline personal finance. But they didn't make it to small business lending. Small business has been the orphan child kept manual because it's paper-based and relies on unstructured data and nobody knew how to automate it.
That led to a miserably manual experience for business owners starting applications, which creates massive churn. Banks are missing out on lots of business and revenue growth because they're losing applicants to frustration before the process even gets started.
The first step toward modernization is making it easy for small businesses to apply and stay engaged through the process. Everything else flows from there.
The Innovation That Won Recognition
The BIG Innovation Award recognized more than just building better lending software. What distinguished Casca was the comprehensive approach to solving a massive problem affecting 33 million American businesses employing 60% of the workforce.
The problem was clear: small businesses faced terrible choices between slow-affordable bank loans and fast-predatory online loans. The solution required technology that could make banks competitive on speed while maintaining their advantage on affordability.
Casca delivered that by building AI-powered systems that automate document processing, underwriting preparation, compliance checks, and customer communication without removing humans from decision-making. The result is 10x faster loan origination, conversion rates jumping from under 10% to over 80%, and small businesses getting access to affordable capital when they actually need it instead of falling prey to lenders charging triple-digit APRs.
From a 12-year-old sitting at a kitchen table nearly losing his home to a CEO transforming how America funds its small businesses, Haffer's journey embodies what innovation actually means. It's not just about building cool technology, it's about using that technology to solve real problems for real people trying to build real businesses that employ real workers and strengthen real communities.
That's what happens when you combine the ethos of the honorable businessman with the belief that small businesses are the economic engine of America and deserve access to affordable capital without predatory terms or 90-day wait times.
Three weeks instead of three months. Nine percent APR instead of 100% or higher. Small businesses surviving instead of failing. That's innovation that actually matters.